*Trigger Warning*

Self-harm and suicidal ideas depiction

 

This is from the darkest part of my life, I feel so lucky to have made the progress that I did since then. I wish none of you could relate, but I’m sure some of you can; just know that if this poem describes how you feel now, life gets better, I’m on your side, just keep trucking.

 

 

An angled steel brush,

Pushed into a scarred canvas,

Depressing the malleable surface.

Sloped sides to a point;

The paint is tapped

 

I tilt my head, bite my lip,

Anticipate a severance

From my reality

 

A hard-fast stroke –

The canvas is parted,

Revealing the art beneath.

Scored pale-yellow sponge;

A thoroughfare is exposed.

 

I release my breath, watch the unfolding scene,

Become a part of the landscape,

A part of me

 

A lattice of red roads

Branched from the blue highway,

Spill their traffic into the scene.

Shiny red reluctantly converges;

The scene is masked.

 

I do not move, breathe,

Fade away

From my Hell

 

A rising scarlet tide gathers strength,

Angrily charging downhill,

To splash lifelessly, pitifully,

Onto one pale leg,

Shattering an army of life

Into a symbol of death

 

I look up, do not see,

Forget the incessant need

To escape myself

 

It’s funny, isn’t it?

How my solution to avoid becoming a void,

Another soulless husk

Among the unfeeling horde of holes,

Escaping the empty

Abyss of a world absent of hope

Is to

Write cryptic messages

In crimson canyons

Hoping to patch a hole

With a hole

 

It’s funny, isn’t it?

How my solution to numbness,

The inability to feel

Pleasure and pain,

Hope and Hell alike,

Emotionally and physically,

Is to

Write cryptic messages

In crimson canyons

Hoping to feel pain rather than

Emptiness

 

It’s funny, isn’t it?

How my solution to superficiality,

My inability to make a difference

Globally or personally,

My own insignificance

Straining to matter,

Is to

Write cryptic messages

In crimson canyons

Hoping to die rather than

Exist in futility

 

Can Life be more effort than it’s worth?

If everyone I know could die

Without dragging a tear from my eye,

What is Life worth?

 

Can Life be more effort than it’s worth?

If my own existence revolts me,

My actions incriminate me to myself,

What is Life worth?

 

A deep gash materializes

Oozing scarlet life away from me,

Not fast enough

The right-angle brush dips once again;

Life is severable after all.

 

A weight is taken by the bed

Legs too weak to stand,

Life is leaving me

Laughing at my weakness

Life is more tenuous than imagined.

 

A sound from a world far away

Crucially unimportant,

She saves my life

Undeserving of the pain,

I endure; I spare her.

I matter.

 

A fumbling in the dark,

A slipknot weakly tied from string,

The life held in above the canyon

Infiltrating the pristine white

Of the pitifully pithy tissue

 

A powerful heartbeat

Rocks my being as I

Slip mercifully into Oblivion,

To wake another day

And endure to the next blissful

Ignorance.